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undercover love
^i love this album and this song in particular. Anyone who likes lesbian robots should listen to it. Link for readers who cannot see embed.
I need to post this post as it just keeps growing as I've begun to feel like talking again, and while K & M persuaded me to get a twit lately it's not the best medium for me and sometimes just leads to dragging people into injokes without warning. Mostly I just retweet cute dog pictures.
Two weeks ago the Zombies, Inc thing turned into a real job, for no reason other than that the guy who owns the show found a buyer for an investment property he was trying to lose and therefore now has more money to plough into Zombies, Inc, and he also likes me. (All employers like me; not sure how much this has to do with the compliance side of the whole siege/compliant thing, and how much has to do with me legit giving a fuck).
I am going with this for a reason that is partly I'm tired and partly I'm curious and partly why not. My life hurts, guys. There is this thing, which I am really good at and really suited for and which I have spent years learning, and I am not being paid to do it on a regular basis because the world is impenetrable; and I am 28 years old and got offered a full-time, permanent job for the first time in my life, and it's something else entirely, which is less hard and which I am not as good at; and in the immediate, it pays, and in the near-term, it pays a little less than I might be worth, and in the long-term, has a lot of potential even outside of my boss's jets of hot air and it certainly won't hurt if the time comes for me to sidle into a tax job in the finance industry. It could also blow up any second, but hey, it's better than it was this summer (large sums of money sighted at the door, clients you would have heard of, etc).
rewind; one thing that's come of the last few months is that I've stopped being completely negative about being a humanities grad. This is due to being suddenly surrounded by smart people with degrees in Useful Things, such as finance/economics or specialist scientific stuff, and they have so many dumb moments, I don't even. I have been assuming that I needed to get certified in a real skill because intelligence does not cut it. One main reason I am so lol about Zombies, Inc is that this is the kind of place I would have loved to be right out of university, which was seven years ago, but nothing comparably good has happened in the meantime because university is a lie.
comparison shots: I've also been moonlighting for the Dingbat this week (because lol extension deadline). He's been giving me the subcontracted yet still absurd sum of $22/hr, plus the chance to reflect on what I get out of doing things, on a totally mundane level. As I never see my clients there, working for the Dingbat involves no social challenges other than your regular old smile-and-nod-at-your-employer's-paranoid-fantasies-and-auditory-hallucinations. I just type stuff into a computer program and then stare at it with my brain, and every so often one learns something compellingly hideous about either the tax code or the human condition. Not seeing the clients does not mean they cannot become precious to me; back in June, I was working through a several-inches-thick file sent in by impressively rich family who had nevertheless not paid their real estate taxes since 1994, and sure were all mad at each other about something, I won't pretend to have fathomed the depths of it, but they enclosed some eye-popping personal emails. Rich people lol.
What is it I enjoy so damn much about taxation? The intricacy involved in staring at things with my brain. I can sometimes do that at Zombies, Inc too but it is bundled with things I am only just now barely learning, on some cortisol-adrenal-social curve, to find rewarding.
(At some point, I think after I applied for the delicious looking Big 4 expatriate tax job (no response yet and yes I am fucking qualified for it), it occurred to me that my first sublime encounter with a 2555 - which I fell in love with because it was complicated enough to make me feel like a taxation wizard by the time I was done - was only about two and a half years ago.)
Zombies, Inc started off monotonously, but this is because I was dropped into a team that was at the time being ignored because we were only making the damn product, not creating money. For a few weeks all I was doing was cleaning data because it was there, and I gradually developed enough understanding of the contents to be interested in it. This is kind of the whole point of having to learn about things. Now I am doing a lot more stuff. I have broad objectives from on high, but at some point 'what should I be doing?' turned into 'quit asking'. I write business fluff articles about topics I know very little about. I am going to an event for the first time next week, and will probably have too much fun to bother to bill Zombies, Inc for my time. But the most important part of it lately is the stuff I am truly awful at. Telephones. More broadly, forming meaningless and inherently unbalanced social relationships.
Fortunately my only option is to get good at it.
I'll stop this post now for the sake of posting it; definitely not exhausted the backlog of work-related ranting. Your cast, if I continue to rant about this job, are The Bond Girl (originally my manager; she has recently been adopting, via cellphone, a persona in which she is a TA for an entirely fictional finance class at a university several hundred miles away), The Cyborg (currently my manager, although not currently a cyborg), My Friend (not currently my friend, it's just this vocal tic he has), Folksy, Small Voice, Chelski (really! he likes them so much he did a study abroad in London just to go see them every weekend!), Wolfie (I'm still not sure what he even does all day), The DJ, and, idk, I guess I will have to refer to our boss as The Carbomb because that would convey the right combination of put-on American Irishness, hot air and people screaming. I like many of them but Folksy is the only one I suspect of being actually interesting. He's marrying an opera singer next year.
I think I want to rant more about how the things I do get assigned money values and why those values are inversely proportional to the raw effort required and what the financialisation of everything might have to do with that; about rebuilding one's neural reward systems; about that feeling of relief at being able to stop struggling, if only for a brief and unknown breather that isn't a breather in that it's hard for me in ways it shouldn't be, but at least I can stop jobhunting and I have some faint hope of never having to go back to school, at least not just in order to be on this not-just-scraping-by, which is all I really needed. Other things are looming instead; thinking about building some real-name-internets because there's now industry fluff out there with my name attached so why not, eg. if I'm feeling far enough away from the tax industry to talk about how broken it is and how the tax code itself creates that brokenness. I am still going to finish the EA exam, though it would be hilarious to put letters after my name that do not pertain to what I am doing for a living.
what you do is, you hand out jigsaw puzzle pieces, and everyone gets one, and sometimes they swap them without realising.
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I hate to think what you'd call me, if you met me.
Nobody whose been on short-term contracts begrudges someone becoming a permie. Learning new stuff is always a pain - I heard a maths prof say the same about learning new maths. Learning is hard. I'm bored out of my skull fiddling with fucking iOS7 and fucking Android bugs that I don't understand. Don't get cocky about the mistakes you don't make that better educated people do make; that's one of my Dad's annoying character flaws and probably confuses education with intelligence.
Where to start with my parents. I definitely qualify as a parentified child: throughout my teens, my parents would only speak to each other via me; and my kid sister used to outright accuse me of trying to act as her parent. But neither of my parents are narcisitic; they're just broken, in their own ways, and fatal together. I'm a decade older than you and you do "catch up" the missing emotional development, if you work at it. In fact, I think I'm overshooting and become a more loving person. I need to get the financial side of my life sorted, though. My one piece of advice is stop repersonifying the "god-field" as capricious (narcistic?) gods; it's just an echo of your experiences. You don't have to give up on the divine, but find a more benevolent personification.
There are several people from my TV.com days whom I miss - and I never met them. Yesterday's comment was part of avoiding the same happening with you. I'm going to reach out to Kristine, and then I might reset my Twitter password and figure out how to use it to follow the pair of you. YOU WILL FOLLOW ME BACK OR I WILL FEEL REALLY INFERIOR. ;)
I am completely lovesick. 70% chance they know and just want to be friends. 25% it's mutual and we might manage to get it together. 5% they fancy me but don't think I fancy them. That was another reason for commenting yesterday: rather than obsessing over one person, I wanted to reach out and strengthen all my relationship. Then something good would have come of it.
I quite like the song. When I've finished wearing out the Submarines I may have to investigate more. (How can you not love a remix (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS_kaU8teSs) that begins "The year is one thousand nine hundred and forty, and something isn't right."?) Fink's Warm Shadow (http://youtu.be/rR1-lyOxEVE) jumped out at me from the Walking Dead soundtrack; he needs more investigation.
Have drafted blogs; may post.
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When I first started reading your blog you were in Florida with a crappy job. Now you're in Boston with a job you half like and time to start planning your career. And you've managed that turnaround in a ridiculously short amount of time. It's really impressive; you've shown what you can do it when you put your mind to it. Now figure out where you want to go and start taking steps towards it.
Re the whole degree thing. Hmmm. Clearly doing an arts degree or, in my Dad's case, no degree doesn't make you dumb; just as doing a science degree doesn't make you smart. I'm reading up on Frege at the moment, and that's every bit as hard a science - in fact, I had a conversation with a physics professor and he gave up. Proper music theory is hard, too. That said, those of us with science degrees know that without the backbone of maths or logic words tend to be behave like jelly; and that's where poets and lawyers lie - smeared in jelly.
Equally, despite getting me my current contract, I haven't used more than three lectures of a three year degree (tbh, I think I've used more of my housemate's electronics degree); I'm sure a good "amateur" would laugh at all my ignorance and mistakes.
But that's fine. Because while they're laughing, I'm learning. In fact, if I have one talent I'm truly proud of: it's the ability to to dumb things. Being smarter than dumb people fun isn't fun; it's boring. I want to be surrounded by smart people who are willing to take the time to point out my mistakes and help me grow - because that's fun. And every once in a while, after dozens of defeats, I will show them up; and that's fun too. But the pleasure comes from the transition; from moving from being crap to being clever. And I've done this enough times that I expect it to happen.
And it's doesn't surprise me you can do the same, because you're clearly smart. So it shouldn't surprise you either. I'm glad you're deriving pleasure from getting better but it routine.
And BTW I don't come here to laud it over you or anything; I come here because you're "awake" - you're self aware, you're trying to grow, you show me interesting things, and you have an original turn of phrase; I want to treat you as a peer to debate.
BTW do you think this comment would've fitted in a tweet?
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I'm really glad your job became a full time one with pay! Security is lovely, especially right now. It gives you an anchor to hold on to, should you decide to pursue the stuff that interests you more, like the tax stuff. Is your work with Dingbat promising enough to get you referred to other finance stuff?
From this end, it seems muddled and kind of confusing, but with promise as being something at least somewhat engaging in the future.
Random aside, I read a comment somewhere that this person didn't get why Agent Coulson is so beloved, he looks like a tax accountant. So should I ever need a nickname for you, you are my BAMF tax accountant friend. :D
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I don't have a nickname for you, shall have to think! What I imagine though is a picture (besides your actual fase of course) -- the one where Kal (I think?) drew you as an long-haired orange blob with "THENE!" on the side. On that note, Jay uses a picture I drew for him as his Twit icon!!!!! Couldn't believe it!
That song is amazing. I haven't been keeping up with the album. I really liked Q.U.E.E.N. "Even though it makes others uncomfortable, I will love who I am."
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I would probably end up going on a screaming rampage after a week of trying to do your job! Beats the hell outa me, the irony being of course, that my workplace frequently is hot enough to be mistaken for hell. (Now I'm wondering what the fuck I love so much about the restaurant industry. huh)